Bug report to my blog

[bobbysmith007]

I’m getting the error: “we are reading non quoted csv data and found a quote at 1″
no matter what I do. SBCL on windows xp (yeah, yeah, laugh all you want, tell my boss).
I know the data is quoted, I want it to be quoted, quote is set correctly, so is always-quote so why does it think it’s non quoted

[bobbysmith007]

If you could provide me with more information it would certainly help us track down what is going wrong.
The 1 in the error message implies that it was the second character of a csv-line that caused this issue. It should have printed the line in question (the one causing the error) below that message. Seeing the data that caused the error would be very useful.

More generally, this error message is generated when cl-csv detects that we have started reading unquoted data, but then encountered a quote. EG: ab"cde","fg","hi",jk would cause this error because it read ab which it interpreted as the start of unquoted data, and then encountered a quote.

[bobbysmith007]

I guess that since I have been unable to duplicate this bug, and have received no feedback about it, that I will close this.

[analyticd]

I got this error too. One of the columns that I have in my data can have the double quote as an inches specifier and this causes the error. How do you overcome this? In this particular case, the column delimiter is #\Tab so you wouldn't expect it to give special meaning to a double quote anyway. Please advise.

[bobbysmith007]

This behaviour is controlled by *quote-escape* and *escape-mode* which defaults to "". If you can upload a minimal failing csv, I can debug and add a test case for this. AFAIK, this works and its tested by test-csv1. By column delimiter do you mean *separator*? If you do not have any *quote* in the document you could set quote to some random unused character (perhaps #\nul) otherwise it expects there to be quoted values.

Here is a test I wrote that shows this working:

(defparameter +test-tab-csv-issue-10+ "id	inches	name
1	72\"	Russ Tyndall
2	67\"	Amy Bobanolis
")

(define-test issue-10-tab-csv (:tags '(parsing bugs whitespace empty-line))
  (let* ((csv (read-csv +test-tab-csv-issue-10+ :quote #\nul :separator #\tab))
         (row1 (second csv)))
    (assert-equal "72\"" (second row1) csv)))

[analyticd]

Thanks! :quote #\nul did the trick